At Redborne School Farm we produce high quality pork from our rare breed Saddleback and Large Black Pigs. Traditionally the Large Black pig was kept as a Bacon pig, with its long back and belly it produces more of the cuts that count.
To cure your own bacon you will need:
1. Joint of good quality pork either a loin of pork to make the classic British back bacon or a Belly of pork to make streaky or American style bacon;
2. A good sharp knife. A boning knife works particularly well;
3. Some Dry cure (Can be purchased from the internet, see
links for more information);
4. Sugar (Optional);
5. Milton or similar sterilising agent;
6. A fridge;
7. A tupperware container with lid; big enough to hold your pork joint.
Method:
1. Skin the pork ensuring that all the rind is removed. The pork rind will not absorb the cure as well and generally it makes the bacon more pallatable with the rind removed. Whilst skinning the pork sterilise the tupperware or plastic tub using the Milton.
2. Trim off some of the excess fat, you don't really need anymore than 10mm of fat around your bacon - even streaky, as again, fat does draw less of the cure inside than the meat. Keep any excess fat or rind as the rind can be used to make delicious scratchings (which if dipped in chocolate make a bizarre but very enjoyable treat) and the fat can be rendered to lard or better still kept for adding moisture to sausage mixes.
3. Weigh the trimmed pork and make a note of the weight.
4. Make up the cure mix. You need to add cure at a ration of 6% cure compared to the weight of your joint. This means if you have a 10kg joint you will need 0.6 kg of cure or 600g. The cure itself is 90% curing salt and 10% sugar (if adding). The sugar makes a sweeter cure and in my opinion makes the bacon even tastier. A 600g cure would contain 540g of curing salts and 60g of sugar.
5. Empty your tub of Milton and dry thoroughly.
It's at this point that you can experiment with your flavours; brown sugar instead of white gives a taste closer to treacle, black pepper and juniper often increase the depth of flavour and even some dry rubbed sage can be used. We used soft dark sugar for a treacle taste.
6. Rub the cure over both sides of the meat, really rubbing it in to cracks and crevices. If you are using more than one piece of meat divide the cure between the two and layer them in your tub.
7. Store in a fridge for 3-4 days for Streaky bacon and 5-6 for Back bacon. The longer you leave to cure the saltier your final product will taste. Make sure you turn your bacon each day, rubbing any loose cure back onto the meat.
Links:
http://www.weschenfelder.co.uk/
for sausage making and bacon curing supplies.
http://www.awsmith.co.uk/
for just about anything you could ever need relating to meat and food in general.
Check back soon to see how our bacon turns out!
The bacon is hung in the smoke house (In our case an old wardrobe we have modified) with plenty of room so that the smoke can circulate around the meat. It should take about 6 hours to take on the smoke flavour. The smoke chamber can be a little difficult to get going so I would advise using a blow torch as it makes life a lot easier.
Once your smoke house was well and truly smoking we shut the doors and left it to it. It's always best to leave it well alone. The only thing that needs to be done is the occasional refill of shavings (It needs to be refilled every 30 - 40 mins)...
